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| PETERSBURG TIMES-Publication Date 10/31/1989 Florida's Bigfoot/ Fact or fable,the"Barden Booger" scares up a storm written by Jeff Klinkenberg Bardin if you want to hear about the Booger,Northeast Florida's answer to the Abominable Snowman, you need to stop and chew the fat with Bud Key at his grocery. Bud who has lived in rural Putnam County for most of his six decades, collects Booger lore and legend. He has never seen the creature, which is supposed to be big and hairy, but he would like to believe it exists. Before you can talk to Bud, though, and get the lowdown on the Booger, you first have to find his country grocery, which is not necessarily easy. Bardin, missing from some maps, is more or less stuck between Gainsville and Apalatka on an unmarked road that cuts through a forest. You have to work a little. Buds is in the middle of deep woods where red-tailed hawks call from trees, skunks lie squashed on the two-lane blacktop and speed limit signs have been blasted by buckshot. Buds is just down the road from three Baptist churches and two spooky cemeteries that serve the 500 families sprinkled through the pines, oaks, and cypress. It's logging country as well as Booger country. But if you been paying attention, and if you've been lucky enough to notice the un-marked Bardin road, you'll eventually see Buds up ahead, on the left, in an opening in the trees. There are gas pumps out front, trucks parked on one side and bales of hay on the other. At a back counter, next to a jar of pickled sausage, you'll find Bud slicing meat. Sure, he'll talk about the Booger. " There are a lot of stories," he says, wiping his hands on a blue jumpsuit. The Bardin Booger is 6 to 8 ft tall, according to most accounts Bud has heard. Booger's footprints are 14 to 18 inches long and 6 to 8 inches wide. He has long legs and walks upright like a human. He is as hairy as all get out. He stinks real bad. Bardin's version of the bogeyman is sometimes seen near the graveyards, but also favors the creeks that meander through the woods to the St. Johns River. Fox hunters, prowling the pines at night, report from time to time. So do motorists who drive the remote roads. Known for a healthy appetite,The Booger is suspected of eating corn left out at night by farmers for their hogs. In one infamous story, he picked up a truck with a hunter in it and shook it like a rag. In another, he drooled over a farmer's hunting dogs while they cowered in their kennel. Those two stories, which were reported in 1982 in the lively supermarket tabloid,The Weekly World News, under the headline "We Live with Bigfoot," were apparently all wrong. So wrong that two Bardin Booger spotters quoted by the Weekly World News no longer talk to the media. But there are many who do. "It kind of looked like a big monkey" says Jackie Cone, a carpenter who has lived in Bardin for all of his 43 years. Five years ago he had his close encounter with what he is sure was the Bardin Booger. "A bunch of us was driving around in a truck one night. Down there, just past the church house by Bud's, we saw a Booger. He went right across the road into the creek." Steve Wilkinson, a baby-faced 18 year-old mechanic at Buds, was the last person to report the Bardin Booger. Last June, he and his uncle were driving Bardin Road about 10 p.m. Sure enough, the Booger hot-footed it across the roadway. " I speeded up," Wilkinson said earnestly," and got a pretty good look. Well, he looked like a hairy gorilla. My uncle wanted to get out and shoot him, but I said "Leave him be, Stay put !" I was scared. The Booger stepped over a fence like it was nothing and walked into the woods. Long legs." The Bardin Booger has been around along time. Bud Keys, who was born in 1928, was afraid of the Booger when he was a boy. "And it had been around along time before me", "he'll tell you. "When I was a boy coming up, I was always scared to go into the woods. One time, I thought I saw him through the screen door. But my daddy convinced me it was just leaves moving." Bardin is the kind of place that feeds the imagination. It seems a million miles from what most people would "call civilized Florida." There are no malls, no apartment complexes, no beauty parlors, no bookstores. Just woods, rivers marshes, little tin-roofed houses, churches, mobile homes, graveyards and a gun shop. And lots of animals. Hunters delight in the deer, turkey and squirrel. Every pickup truck comes complete with a gun rack. Bears also keep things interesting for the beekeepers in the area. And when night comes, and the moon rises, and the wind starts rattling the trees, some people claim to see and hear critters that aren't on any game list. In that, Bardin's Booger- watchers are no different from other Floridians. Such monsters have been reported all over the state for years. In 1942, a man driving a dirt road near the Suwannee River claimed a giant ape jumped on his car's running board and stayed there, staring into the window, for half a mile. A few years later, a Manatee County commercial fisherman swore he had a tug -of-war with an apelike creature over a net full of mullet. In 1948,huge tracks were found on Clearwater Beach. During the next two decades they were discovered on beaches from Indian Rocks to the Suwannee River. Alas, the Clearwater Monster was eventually uncovered as a fraud. A prankster had been hiking beaches wearing giant footwear. In 1971,Hernando County had ape problems, and there were no practical jokers in sight. A rancher reported that an 8 foot hairy animal had scared the bejeebers out of his horses. A St. Petersburg man, the late Gordon Prescott, formed an organization known as the" Yeti Research Society" and went to investigate. Prescott announced that the creature almost certainly had to be the "missing link" between monkey and Homo sapiens. He even estimated that Florida had at least 100 ape-men. South Florida, meanwhile, was also an ape-man paradise. There, the creature was known as the Skunk Ape because of its alleged body odor. In 1971,the Skunk ape made national headlines when a woman living on the edge of the Everglades said some kind of weird gorilla peeped into her window. A police search failed to turn up the 5-foot tall visitor, though an animal control officer discovered strange footprints that measured 12 inches long. In 1974,a near-hysterical motorist driving a remote Everglades road late one night reported hitting an 8-foot tall creature. Police,who used a searchlight-equipped helicopter in their hunt, found nothing. An hour later, five miles away, another motorist called the police about a huge, two-legged animal that limped across the road into the trees. It too eluded the law officers in hot pursuit. Florida has a number of large predators, including black bears and panthers. The panther is the states rarest and most elusive animal. A panther can weigh 150 pounds, is light brown in color, has a long graceful tail and walks on all fours like all cats. Black bears may weigh as much as 500 pounds and typically walk on all fores. When the occasionally stand on their hind legs, they might measure 5 feet and be mistaken for a Booger. "I don't know what to think of the reports," says Don Wood, endangered species specialist for the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission. "We've never really investigated, though I've got a little file on yetis, Skunk Apes, whatever you want to call them. One time somebody sent us some hair that was supposedly from a Skunk Ape. But it turned out to be Spanish moss." Bardin has been a hot bed of stories throughout the 1980's. A farmer named Randy Medlock was a source for many. An avid fox hunter, he spent most of his nights in the woods, and one night saw something that gave him the creeps. At first, he didn't say anything about it, because he was afraid people would doubt him. But the cousin who was with him had loose lips, and word got out. The associated Press found Medlock. "This thing came out of the woods, "AP quoted him as saying. "It walked on two legs, it was big and hairy and looked like a bear, but it had a pug nose and walked upright, like a man. The way it walks a bear couldn't walk like that." Its arms were swinging, ,just the way you and I walk. It walked across about 30 feet in front of the car. We were on a big sand hill. It looked sideways at us and kept walking. I knew it was strong because when it walked back into the woods, it just slapped pine saplings out of its way like they were nothing." Medlock said he got out of his truck and looked at the tracks. They were larger than his size 13 feet. The supermarket tabloids, when they found out about Medlock, had a field day with the unfortunate farmer, who says he was badly misquoted in their Bigfoot stories. If you call Madlock now, his wife answers, and she will not summons her husband to the phone. "He doesn't talk about Boogers anymore." she says. But over at Bud Key's grocery,the bardin Booger is alive and thriving. Bud, a white haired man who is honorary mayor and a Barry Goldwater look alike, keeps a scrapbook of clippings about the Boogers comings and goings. He has a drawing of the Bardin Booger in his front window. The Bardin Booger caps and T-shirts he sells go almost as fast as his pickled eggs, beef jerky and chain saws. He can hardly keep them in stock. "I like the Bardin Booger,"he says. "I've never seen him,but he's good for business." Somebody is always showing up looking for the Booger, and Bud does his best to accommodate. While he can't guarantee a Booger sighting, he can direct an interested party to a known Booger- infested area. And he can make the introductions to the lucky few who have seen a Booger and lived to tell about it. CBS showed up at Bud's a few years ago, shot some footage in the woods and made a 3-minute Booger documentary it broadcast in between Saturday morning cartoons. Seven years ago, Palatka's Billy Crain came over to Bud's and wrote, produced and sang a country record about the Booger. Turned out there was a market for Booger music: Crain has sold more than 6,000 copies so far. "Hey ,Mr. Bardin Booger' Bardin is your home and every day you love to roam," Crain croons." You run through the bushes and you run through the trees. Hey, Mr. Bardin Booger, don't get me please." The Booger has never gotten anybody, though. The Booger has never harmed a hair on a single head. " I was scared when I saw him"\," says Steve E. Wilkinson, Buds mechanic, who had his moment with the Booger last June." But I don't think he's dangerous." A few nights after he saw the Booger cross the road, Wilkinson loaded his hog feeder with corn and went to bed. In the morning, the corn was gone. But the ground was covered with great big Booger tracks. "My daddy and I talked about shooting him," Wilkinson Says, "But we didn't know if that would be against the law or not. Finally, we just decided to let him roam these woods." He's out there now." |
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